Saudi Arabia continues to fund and export its Wahhabi brand of Islam, making it a "strategic threat" to the United States in the worldwide war on terror, the chairman of the U.S. government commission on religious freedom said yesterday.
"It is an ideology that is incompatible with the war on terrorism," said Michael Young, chairman of the State Department's Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The commission, established by Congress during the Clinton administration as a State Department body charged with monitoring religious rights, held a hearing yesterday titled: "Is Saudi Arabia a Strategic Threat: The Global Propagation of Intolerance."
Wahhabism is a puritanical form of Islam that teaches intolerance of anyone who does not conform to its worldview -- Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
It is taught in Saudi schools and preached in tens of thousands of government-supported mosques.
Several panelists said considering this type of education, it was no accident that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudis.
In addition, Saudi Arabia's oil wealth -- in the form of government grants, individual donations by members of the royal family and charity boxes at mosques -- has been responsible for exporting and funding this ideology to Islamic schools and mosques in Pakistan, Indonesia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and East Africa, members of the panel said.
"The Saudi royal family has shown it has no inclination for real reform," said Mai Yamani, a Saudi academic who has been threatened with arrest if she returns to her country.
"Not only has the state embraced the hard-liners, the hard-liners are the state, deeply embedded in the structure. The state gives [fundamentalist clerics] power and money in return for religious legitimacy," she told the hearing.
